To stop, choose the appropriate Stop menu item.

Recording Tips

Sample-accurate VGMs: These are generally only needed when recording sampled audio (ie. voices). For music, frame-accurate (which is what non-sample-accurate VGMs are) gives exactly the same results, and the files are smaller.

How much to record: You should record plenty of music, until you are sure you have heard the whole of the looped section, plus quite a bit more. Make sure there are no sound effects played, because they will be recorded as well.

Fast-recording: You might want to use speed-up features to "fast-forward" as you log the music; in Meka you can press F2 to switch to manual frameskip mode, and use F4 to speed it up to 1/9 (press F2 again to go back to automatic mode). In Dega, hold F8 to speed it up.

Game speed: Most games were designed for play on 60Hz machines, in Japan or the US. Some games were designed and only released in Europe, and their music is probably designed for playback at 50Hz. In Meka, the "TV Type" setting affects the playback speed of the VGMs; in Dega it's the "PAL" menu item. The general rule is, record at NTSC/60Hz unless you have good reason to record at 50Hz, since if necessary the plugin can be set to play back 60Hz files at 50Hz.

Slow computer? Use the emulator's hard-pause facility (F12 in Meka, Pause/Break in Dega). This will stop emulation (and VGM logging), unlike when you use the game's software pause facility by pressing the emulated Pause button. This will make Meka's GUI as fast as possible, and Dega responds faster too. This also (sort of) gives you a keyboard shortcut for VGM logging too.

Getting the music start: It's a lot easier to record a VGM if you can control when the music starts. Try pausing the game; some will restart the music when you pause (eg. Alex Kidd in Miracle World), although most stop all sound. Some will restart the music when you unpause (eg. Cosmic Spacehead). Maybe there's a point in the game where you can change to another screen and the music starts there. If the music has an introduction, before the looping part, it's important to get that; if it doesn't, and the whole music loops, you can get away with missing the start and trimming down to the second complete loop, although a silent start makes editing much easier.

Getting music without sound effects: This can be tricky...

• Try the above pause tricks
• Try and find a point in the game where you can stand still (or whatever, depending on the game genre) and have no SFX play for as long as you need
• See if the game has a sound test, either openly or via a cheat (check online cheat archives)
• Maybe the demo plays the music but not the SFX?
• Some games have an option to turn off the SFX (eg. Cool Spot)
• See if the same music's played somewhere else in the game, or if you can enter the same area via a different method (maybe by losing a life and restarting) to avoid whatever's interfering with the music
• If all else fails, the game can probably be hacked to play the music you want at a time when no SFX will play, or to make no SFX play. Read Bock's article here.

Now go and open an Explorer window where the file was created (in the \musics subfolder of Meka's folder, or where you chose in Dega). You'll want access to this folder several times before you finish.

Next, you need to record the whole VGM to a raw wave file. To do this, in Winamp press Ctrl+P to open the Preferences window; on the "Output plug-ins" page, choose the "Disk Writer" plugin. If you don't have it then you can download it from Winamp's website.

Press the Configure button to choose where to create the file; note that it will be quite large, probably between 10 and 100MB depending on the recording length (it'll use 172KB per second, that's 10MB per minute of audio). Don't worry, you'll delete it in a minute.

Now close the preferences window, and drag-and-drop your VGM file onto Winamp's main window. It should play the file very quickly, and you won't hear anything, because it's writing the audio to a WAV file instead. When it finishes, go back to the plugin window and choose the output plugin that you were using before (probably "waveOut"), so you can listen to music again.

This is the slowest and most difficult part of the process. Open your newly-created WAV file in your wave editor, and zoom out fully. The music will be one of three types:

1. A single non-looping track, eg. Alex Kidd title screen music:
   
   1. Stuff before the music starts
   2. The music you want
   3. Stuff after it finishes

2. A simple loop, where when the music finishes it goes back to the start, eg. Alex Kidd in Miracle World level 1:
   
   1. Stuff before the music starts (because you started recording before the music started)
   2. Looped section
   3. Looped section, played again

3. An introduction, which leads in to a looping section, eg. most Wonder Boy III tracks
   
   • Stuff before the music starts (because you started recording before the music started)
   • Introduction
   • Looped section
   • Looped section, played again

You need to find the exact position of two or three dividing lines between sections:

• The Start - everything before this will be discarded
• The Finish - everything after this will be discarded
• The Loop point - the start of the looped section. Type I doesn't have a Loop point, and for Type II it's the same as the Start point.

You need to find out the sample number for these points; if your wave editor can't display that, you can multiply the precise position in seconds (with decimal places) by 44100. Here's the points for the above Type III wave, shown in close-up:

The numbers are the sample number where the dotted yellow line is. Write these numbers down, or enter them in VGM Tool as you go.

Hint: while you don't have to be absolutely precise, you may have minor sound problems, usually with the noise channel, if you choose a point *after* the exact position, so try to get as close as you can without going past it.

Now, open VGM Tool, and drag-and-drop your VGM file onto it.

Enter the numbers you just found for the start, end and loop points (if applicable). Check the Loop checkbox if the file loops, leave it unchecked if it doesn't.

Then just click on Trim. Almost instantly, a file will be created in the same folder as the original called "trimmed.vgm". You should then click on "Play trimmed" to open it in Winamp, and check that it starts at the right place, and that it sounds right when it loops. If you don't hear anything, check you set the Winamp output plugin back to the right one, and that it's not writing it to a file instead.

...rename it...

Now rename trimmed.vgm to reflect the track title. It doesn't have to be the final name, just make sure you know which file it is from the name.

...and change the info

Drop the newly-renamed file onto VGMTool so any changes will be made to it instead of the original. First, the playback rate. This is important: the number you put in here depends on the TV setting of the emulator you used.

Enter the appropriate value and click on "Write". This will allow the file to be played at different rates.

Then, enter appropriate data in the GD3 section regarding the track, game, etc. If you don't know a value, leave it blank. If you used Meka then it might have filled in some parts for you already. Click on "Write" to add this data to the file.

If you don't know some of the information, maybe someone on the Music Forum can help.

You probably don't need to change the Version, the file will play fine, and only people with hex editors will see its value; however, it is best to set it properly. At the time of writing, it should be 1.01.

Your file is now pretty much finished. However, one track does not make a soundtrack (well, not for most games anyway). It's much nicer to have a complete soundtrack, isn't it?

So now, you'll want to go and record all the other tracks and repeat the above steps for each one, won't you? :) Use your judgement to decide what counts as a music track and what's a sound effect, since the dividing line is not clear. Also, now you've decided to do a complete music rip, it might be a good idea to post on the Music Forum saying that you're doing this particular game; some other people might have files they can contribute, and it'll save two people doing the same game (which has happened).

Click here to download an example description file. Here's what it contains:

***********************************************
* VGM music package                           *
* http://www.smspower.org/music               *
***********************************************
Game name:           Super Mega Race-O-Matic
System:              Sega Master System
Complete music dump: Yes
FM:                  No
Original author:     I.P. Freely
Publisher:           Sega
Files created by:    Al Koholic
Files version:       1.00
Files, in approximate game order:
Name                                Length:
                                    Total  Loop
Example looping track               1:52   1:34
Example non-looping track           0:16   -
Notes:
Example information file

• Load each file in turn in VGMTool to allow you to copy data from there when necessary.
• If you don't know the original author put "Unknown" (without quotes)
• The version should be less than 1.00 if the collection is not complete (best possible track titles, all tracks), incremented by 0.01 for minor changes and bumped up to the next 0.10 step for bigger changes.
• Put just the track title in the Name column, to match what's in the track title field in that file's GD3 tag
• Try to put the files in the best order you can, so the title screen comes first, the levels are in order, and the ending music is last (or nearly last). There's some music which is harder to decide where to put it (eg. Game Over), just put it where it seems best to you.
• In the Length columns, you want to put the total length of the track (Total) and the length of the looped section (Loop). To find these, you can load the VGM file in VGMTool; it'll tell you the two values to use as shown here - the Length: Total box shows the total length (in m:ss format), and the Loop box shows the loop length, or '-' if the track does not loop.
• Put anything you feel is relevant in the Notes field, or put '-' (without quotes) if you don't want to put anything.
• Don't use tabs! Use spaces to fill the gaps, because if you use tabs it is likely not to line up when displayed in another program.

You'll need a program that can create GZip files. Programs like WinZip and WinRAR can read them but not create them. If you like, you can get the GZip program from www.gzip.org (in the Executables section, choose the Windows 95/98/NT download). Alternatively, I've made a program for my own use, called GZipper, which you can download here. If you're using GZip, use these commandline settings to get the best compression:

gzip -9 -n <filename>

and rename the .vgm.gz file created to .vgz. (VGZ is the extension given to compressed VGM files.) If you don't have Explorer set to show file extensions, you won't get to see this, so change that setting. Explorer will probably also insist on confirming you want to change the file type; you do.

If you're using my program, just drop a .vgm file onto its icon and it'll create (and overwrite if necessary) a .vgz file with the same name as the .vgm in the same folder, with the best compression. I recommend you don't delete the VGMs; instead, put them in a Zip file - that will make it easier if you find you want to edit them later.

Next, change the name of the file. It should be of the form:

<Game name> - <Track name>.vgz

Game name and track name will obviously be the same as you entered in the GD3 tag.

You may be tempted to do this using Winamp. However, Winamp adds extra information to the playlist file. If you do create the file using Winamp, you must open it in a text editor and delete every line starting with a '#', otherwise the track titles and lengths displayed in the playlist will not reflect the plugin settings other people have chosen.

To create it manually, make a plain text file with the filename of each track on a new line, in the same order they are listed in the description file. This playlist file should be named <Game name>.m3u. Be sure to load it in Winamp to check all the filenames are right ('Dead file!' will be displayed next to ones that are wrong).

Now just put everything (VGZ files, the description TXT file and the playlist M3U file) together in a Zip file, and e-mail it to Bock. If it's up to scratch, it'll be added to the VGM Archive.